1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, a print setting control method, and a computer-readable storage medium. More specifically, the present invention provides a technique usable to perform processing relating to the conflict in the print setting.
2. Description of the Related Art
As discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-202865, there is a conventional technique relating to the conflict in the print setting, which prohibits any setting from being used if it is theoretically meaningless or cannot be processed by a printer. The discussed technique includes automatically generating a conflict rule complementally established based on conflict processing rules (a plurality of conflict processing rules registered beforehand in a system) and executing conflict processing necessary to perform the print setting using the automatically generated conflict rule.
In a workflow of a commercial printing service, such as Print On Demand (POD), to process a massive amount of sheets different in type and size, printers are often required to accept an exception setting (special setting applied only to a designated page/region, which is different from the entire setting). Accordingly, in the workflow of the commercial printing service such as POD, the number of print setting items increases and the number of combination patterns of the print setting increases correspondingly.
The following problems arise if the conflict processing is performed based on the conflict processing rules registered beforehand in the system as discussed in the above-described Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-202865.
(1) Potential Trouble Possibly Increasing
If the number of combination patterns of the print setting increases excessively, there will be an increased number of patterns that cannot be covered by the conflict processing rules. Therefore, many patterns will cause troubles because they are not subjected to the conflict processing to be performed.
(2) Incomplete Conflict Processing
The requirement to develop a printer capable of processing a massive amount of combination patterns of the print setting may lead a developer/manufacturer of the printer to choose the way of intentionally excluding part of the settings from the target of the conflict processing. As a result, some settings that cannot be processed by a printer may be transmitted to the printer and errors may be caused in the print processing.
Moreover, the following problems arise.
(3) Know-how to be Commonly Used
Because of complicatedness in the print setting, it is difficult to share the information relating to settings having caused any trouble. Therefore, a similar failure arises if the printer is used by another user.
(4) Difficulty in Introducing Conflict Processing
Complicatedness in the processing generally increases according to the number of combination patterns of the print setting. Therefore, when the conflict processing is introduced, a large number of man-hour will be required and the conflict processing cannot be easily introduced to the system.